29 May 2014

Artist Attempts To Visualize The Internet In Ambitious, Crowd-Sourced Drawing

Artist Benjamin Redford embarked on an ambitious project called “Internetopia”, in which he attempted to visualize the internet in this large drawing.

The drawing is 2 x 1.5-meters, and was created with technical pens and pencils. What makes this project unique is that over 200 people around the world contributed to it, asking Redford to draw what they would like to see. The artist believes that it may be one of the largest crowd-sourced drawings ever.

Redford was inspired by science fiction’s notion of cyberspace, which is a “super structured and efficient gird system, probably lit with loads of neon”. Using the idea of a grid, the artist took his project to Kickstarter, where people could pay him US$1 for a cube of space and ask him to draw something in the spaces they had reserved.

Some people asked Redford to draw their Twitter handles, while another asked him to place a sign that said, “NSA spying not welcome here.” Another person asked him to draw Boston, while two people requested him to doodle penises.

The artist has admitted that his project has limitations as it would be difficult to capture the entire internet—“you can't put the Internet in a box like that,” he said. He has also admitted that depicting the internet as it really is would mean drawing “a whole bunch of underground pipes”, something people would be less interested in.

You can view the entire drawing over here—what do you think of this project?